UCLA maintains top-tier position in prestigious world university rankings

UCLA Newsroom |
August 15, 2013

For the third consecutive year, UCLA is rated second among U.S. public universities in Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities, which was published today. The prestigious SJTU survey, which evaluates more than 1,000 institutions, also placed UCLA 12th among all universities internationally for the third year in a row.

In compiling its rankings, SJTU takes into account factors such as faculty publications and research citations, and the number of alumni and faculty who have won Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals. Six UCLA alumni and six faculty members have won Nobel prizes — including, most recently, emeritus professor of economics and mathematics Lloyd Shapley, who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2012 — and one, Terence Tao, was awarded the Fields, widely considered the "Nobel Prize in mathematics."

The top universities in the SJTU rankings were, in order, Harvard University, Stanford University, UC Berkeley (the study's top-ranked public university), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Cambridge, California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, University of Oxford and Yale University.

In addition to UCLA and UC Berkeley, four other UC campuses were named among the top 50 overall: UC San Diego (14), UC San Francisco (18), UC Santa Barbara (35), UC Irvine (45) and UC Davis (47).